Min Zeng


2022

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VScript: Controllable Script Generation with Visual Presentation
Ziwei Ji | Yan Xu | I-Tsun Cheng | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Rita Frieske | Etsuko Ishii | Min Zeng | Andrea Madotto | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

In order to offer a customized script tool and inspire professional scriptwriters, we present VScript. It is a controllable pipeline that generates complete scripts, including dialogues and scene descriptions, as well as presents visually using video retrieval. With an interactive interface, our system allows users to select genres and input starting words that control the theme and development of the generated script. We adopt a hierarchical structure, which first generates the plot, then the script and its visual presentation. A novel approach is also introduced to plot-guided dialogue generation by treating it as an inverse dialogue summarization. The experiment results show that our approach outperforms the baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, especially in genre control.

2019

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Dirichlet Latent Variable Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder in Dialogue Generation
Min Zeng | Yisen Wang | Yuan Luo
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Variational encoder-decoders have achieved well-recognized performance in the dialogue generation task. Existing works simply assume the Gaussian priors of the latent variable, which are incapable of representing complex latent variables effectively. To address the issues, we propose to use the Dirichlet distribution with flexible structures to characterize the latent variables in place of the traditional Gaussian distribution, called Dirichlet Latent Variable Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder model (Dir-VHRED). Based on which, we further find that there is redundancy among the dimensions of latent variable, and the lengths and sentence patterns of the responses can be strongly correlated to each dimension of the latent variable. Therefore, controllable responses can be generated through specifying the value of each dimension of the latent variable. Experimental results on benchmarks show that our proposed Dir-VHRED yields substantial improvements on negative log-likelihood, word-embedding-based and human evaluations.